The recent few years has witnessed an explosive growth of data traffic in networks, particularly in cellular wireless networks. This growth has been fueled by a number of new developments that includes faster, smarter, and more intuitive mobile devices such as the popular iPhone® series and the iPad® series, as well as faster wireless and cellular network technologies that deliver throughputs on par or better than fixed line broadband technologies.
For many people today, a primary mode of access to the Internet is via mobile devices using cellular wireless networks. Users have come to expect the same quality of experience as in fixed line broadband networks. To meet this insatiable demand, wireless network operators are taking a number of steps such as installing additional cell towers in congested areas, upgrading the backhaul network infrastructure that connects the base stations with the packet core, and deploying newer radio access technologies such as Dual-Cell High Speed Downlink Packet Access (DC-HSDPA) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). While these approaches help with meeting the demand for quality of experience, the slow pace at which major network upgrades can be made is not keeping up with the rate at with data traffic is growing. Furthermore, the cost of such network upgrades is not commensurate with the revenue per subscriber that the wireless operator is able to get, i.e., the cost being much higher than any increase in revenue the wireless operator can expect. Faced with these challenges, cellular wireless network operators across the globe are introducing various traffic management techniques to control the growth of data traffic and increase their revenues at the same time.
Traffic Management is a broad concept and includes techniques such as throttling of low priority traffic, blocking or time shifting certain types of traffic, and traffic optimization. Optimization of web and video traffic is a key component in the array of traffic management techniques used by wireless operators. Web traffic refers to traditional web site browsing, and video traffic refers to watching videos over the Internet—between the two, web and video traffic account for more than 80% of the data traffic in typical cellular wireless networks.